Blog by Lillian Wieland Medical school interviews loom ahead, making applicants scramble to prepare. We’ll go to our advisors, asking “What will give me an edge?” In return, we might hear the common advice to write down all of our patient interaction stories and craft a narrative on how those experiences impacted us as future […]
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Reflections on PRIDE 2021: Intersectional Identities
Blog by Henry Ng, MD, MPH (he/they) Millions of people celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride month every June in the United States and around the world. As we emerge from the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and begin to congregate and celebrate our lives and selves, our jubilance is tempered by sobering statistics from the pandemic on […]
Drawing Attention to and Restoring Order in ADHD
‘Take Care of Zizi’ (TV Series, directed by Karim El Shennawy, Egypt, 2021) Mariam Naoum, Mona El Shimi and Magdy Amin (TV script writers) in conversation with Khalid Ali, film, and media correspondent In the critically acclaimed Arab TV series ‘Take Care of Zizi’,. Zizi (Amina Khalil) is a young […]
Politics of Difference and Grammars of Influence in the Postgenomic Era: Fire, Soil, Spirit
Article Summary by Lara Choksey The great and humbling lesson of the Human Genome Project was that histories of embodiment are complex social matters. The era in the life sciences imperfectly described as the postgenomic, the period ‘after’ the sequencing of the human genome, has involved a turn to the effects of influences external to […]
Time Considered as a Helix of Infinite Possibilities
Article Summary by Jay Clayton This contribution to the special issue of Medical Humanities on Global Genetic Fictions focuses on an award-winning science fiction story by Samuel R. Delany, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” In the story, Delany imagines something he calls “hologramic information storage,” which allows an interplanetary Special Service agent […]
Painful Metaphors: Enactivism and Art in Qualitative Research
Article Summary by Peter Stilwell There is now widespread consensus that pain is subjective, meaning that it is a private and personal experience. Because pain is experienced from a person’s unique perspective, others (e.g., healthcare practitioners, family, friends) cannot directly “see” or fully understand what the experience is like. To somewhat express what it is […]
Diagnosis: Truth and Tales
Review by Jeffrey M. Brown Jutel, Annemarie Goldstein. Diagnosis: Truth and Tales. University of Toronto Press, 2019. In a short verse from his posthumous collection Falling Ill (2016), American poet C. K. Williams offered a richly ambiguous representation of his experience receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. The poem, “Diagnosis,” begins with a coherent reflection on […]
Genetic Enhancement, TED Talks and the Sense of Wonder
Article Summary by Loredana Filip Science can be communicated to the public in various ways, including books and journal articles. And yet in our digital world, online interactions have a growing impact on the audience. TED talks became a widely available and highly popular resource for the communication and reception of science. They reach huge […]
Nature, Film, and Positive Change
Blog by Jayaraj Jayaraj, award-wining film maker, reflects on ‘Birds Club International’ an Environment Project on the World Day to combat Desertification and Drought, 17th June 2021. Birds Club International (BCI) aims to revive nature by not just planting trees, but by cooperating with various individuals and organisations in our society to highlight the […]
Depersonalization of Suffering Amidst COVID-19 Second Wave in India
Blog by Swati Satish Joshi The understanding of the suffering of patients infected with corona virus, especially during the second wave in India, transformed from being subjective to objective, personal to data-centric, and general to individual. While media was engrossed in covering stories of blame (critiquing liberties sanctioned by government, for instance, gatherings of thousands […]